Yes, I’m talking to you, even if you are not a trust fund baby—make that especially if you are not a trust fund baby.

I fear that with all the politicized talk of “Wall Street” and the images that shorthand conjures up in our minds of rapacious bankers and hedge fund managers, we’ve lost track of what the stock market is really all about. A bright young colleague of mine recently said she’d put a little money in the market, had seen it appreciate, but was now feeling a bit guilty about her “blood money” and wanted to cash out.

I fear her disdain is common among millennial progressives, who aren’t likely to break out in celebration if and when the Dow Jones Industrial Average breaks through the 20,000-point milestone it has approached in recent weeks. A Gallup survey last spring reported that only 52 percent of respondents had any money (or a spouse’s money) invested in the stock market, the lowest percentage in several decades.

That’s a shame. The stock market is not only a barometer of our nation’s business ingenuity, it’s also a testament to our shared commitment to a meritocratic form of participatory democracy.

I was reminded of this reading Shoe Dog, Phil Knight’s engaging and refreshingly candid memoir. The Nike founder recounts how financially stressful the company’s early days were, not only at the very beginning but well after it had become apparent that consumers craved Nike’s revolutionary running shoes, and the company was doubling its sales every year. The trouble was, the faster the scrappy Oregon-based competitor to the Adidas behemoth grew, the more nervous its bankers became, having to finance Knight’s vision “on the float,” paying the costs for each new product cycle before their revenue came in to cover the bills. The only answer, which Knight resisted until 1980, was to raise capital by going public; only then was Nike’s long-term success assured.

The stock market enabled the swoosh to eclipse Adidas as an iconic global brand, giving consumers more choice and, yes, making Knight and those who chose to back him billions of dollars in the ensuing decades. And now the stock market is the only reason scrappy Under Armour has itself been able to scale up to take on what it considers—as Knight once considered Adidas—the dominant but unimaginative incumbent in the industry based in Oregon. The market’s wonderfully subversive that way.

It’s become a political trope to talk about the distinction between “Wall Street” and “Main Street” but what a stock market allows is for the most worthy ideas from Main Street to grow and succeed. Think what you will of the bankers on Wall Street, but the market is really about whether we will all be able to benefit from the inspiration of a Phil Knight or a Steve Jobs, and those who will improve upon what they have done.

Knight’s initial hesitation to going public—the significance of the phrase itself is worth appreciating—arose from the same reason the rest of us should appreciate the stock market and seek to preserve its central role in our economy. He understood that once a company trades its shares on the market, it is accountable to the public. In exchange for being able to raise money from perfect strangers like you via your pension fund or 401(k), companies listed on the stock market are forced by landmark New Deal era legislation to embrace a radical degree of transparency, reporting quarterly results and any reverses they suffer along the way. Their managers, meanwhile, become directly subservient to outside shareholders. Knight had no choice but to embrace such transparency—his parents were not in a position to lend him millions of dollars to bankroll his company’s growth.

Which brings us (sorry) to Donald Trump. Our president-elect’s personal story, business practices, and worldview don’t reflect the ethos of the stock market. Indeed, the opaque and dynastically-run Trump Organization is the antithesis of a democratic, publicly-traded company.

It’s a fun mental exercise to imagine Trump having to navigate the challenges of running a publicly-traded company all those years, if he hadn’t been able to take the aristocratic route of being financed by his father, around the same time that Knight was having to access the public market. Imagine Trump having to report each quarter to pesky journalists, analysts, and institutional investors how the company was faring, and why. Imagine him having to file public disclosures about all his vindictive litigation, and having to address pointed questions about why the CEO of a modestly-sized company was flying around in a 757, and appointing relatives to run various divisions, not to mention tarnishing the company’s brand by disparaging Latinos, Muslims, women, and plenty of other Americans.

Who knows, maybe Trump’s company, thus cured of its cult of personality, would have become a more formidable enterprise, one more closely resembling its creator’s hyperbole. Trump himself would have been long deposed, or long-since reformed into a person better qualified to represent and work on behalf of competing stakeholders and interests in a strategic manner—better qualified, that is, to be President of the United States.

Of course the stock market is far from perfect. Capitalism entails risk, and for every windfall pension funds or individual investors reaped investing early in the likes of Microsoft and Nike, plenty of money has been lost backing bad ideas. You’re smiling now if you bought into Facebook when it started trading publicly and frowning if you invested in Twitter. But who’s to know where each will be in five years? And worse than the speculative uncertainty inherent in stock investing is the recurring sense, triggered by accounting and insider trading scandals, that the market may be rigged by people in the know.

Yet for all the scandals that have afflicted Wall Street, our system is far more efficient at funding worthy ideas to spark innovation and create jobs than any secretive and closed Trumpian world ever could be, where equity can only be raised from family, immediate associates, or a bank loan officer. Our system, with its relentless insistence on transparency and disclosure, is also far better at minimizing fraud. The rule of law and a certain level of social cohesion are key prerequisites for a system in which people are willing to fund ventures beyond their immediate circle; it’s no accident the first functional modern stock market was established in the cosmopolitan, relatively tolerant and egalitarian Dutch Republic, as opposed to a more static, dynastic society. And it should be a source of pride to Americans that our stock market remains the envy of the world. It’s easy for less open societies (see China) to open their own stock markets, but these don’t require the same level of transparency of listing companies, or protect the rights of minority shareholders to the degree ours does, which is why the best companies from those countries still yearn to be listed in our stock market.

The stock market shouldn’t be a partisan issue. It’s a shame that progressives don’t balance their justified outrage at some of Wall Street bankers’ excesses with an acknowledgment of the democratic essence of an accessible stock market that allows entrepreneurs and innovators to fund their companies and take on complacent incumbents. Without dynamic equity markets, our economy would be dominated entirely by private companies like the Trump Organization and business tycoons who inherited their dominant position. It’s a shame that President Obama hasn’t felt more comfortable explaining the market’s meritocratic ethos and applauding his own results in tripling the stock market’s value since its recession lows in the early days of his administration. It’s a shame that politicians from both parties spent this entire populist-tinged election cycle bad-mouthing the market, making millions of younger Americans like my colleague feel like they should stay away, or feel guilty if they don’t.

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There are plenty of reasons for China’s once-exuberant stock market to be in a slump. The underlying economy’s growth rate is slowing down. The yuan is losing some of its value as it is allowed to trade more freely and become a legitimate global currency. The yuan’s legitimacy is good for the country in the long term, but makes Chinese investors feel poorer in the short term and encourages them to take their money out of the country and invest in other currencies. At the same time, many Chinese investors, both individuals and companies, have been burned in recent years by their investments in other emerging markets. Beijing’s crackdown on corruption at state enterprises and among party officials and their business cronies has also accelerated capital flight, as people are eager to take their money (including ill-gotten gains) out of the country and invest in safer harbors (say, California real estate). Finally, geopolitical uncertainties like North Korea’s attempts to develop a hydrogen bomb test and Middle East tensions don’t help inspire investor confidence.

So things came to a head in the first week of the year, as Chinese regulators sought to impose some order on (if not slam the brakes on) their stock market selloff. On Thursday, a newly designed “circuit-breaker” shut down the markets for the day after the stock index had plummeted 7 percent in a mere 29 minutes. U.S. markets also have so-called circuit breakers to ensure that wild swings in markets don’t take on a life of their own due to algorithm-triggered trading. But the U.S. market circuit breakers aren’t as quick to intervene, and don’t disrupt trading for as long.

This interruption of China’s markets on Thursday captured much of the attention last week, as did all the news that made investors jittery in the first place. Less attention was paid to what might have been the main culprit of the week’s financial chaos: a time bomb set by China’s Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) back in July of 2015.

Last summer was a major wake-up call for Chinese investors and global markets that real trouble was brewing in the Chinese economy. As the Shanghai Composite Index fell from its peak of 5166 on June 12, 2015, to 3507 on July 8, the CSRC tried to calm the market by banning major shareholders, corporate executives, and directors (with stakes exceeding 5 percent) from selling stakes in companies listed on the exchange for six months. That six-month ban expired, as scheduled, last Friday, at the end of a week already marked by frenetic selling.

It’s human nature to want to avoid bad things from happening, but outlawing selling in financial markets always backfires. Countries often impose exchange controls to avoid too much money leaving the country (think Argentina in recent years), or declare bank “holidays” to stop everyone from withdrawing their savings at once (think Greece last summer). What invariably happens, absent some quick fix to the underlying crisis of confidence, is that people only become more anxious and unsettled, increasing the urge to sell, and run.

A key to understanding the psychology of any market is that no one wants to be the last to sell, to be left holding the proverbial bag. So when you ban major shareholders, corporate executives and directors from selling stakes for six months, and everyone else knows the first day they can sell any shares again is on Friday, what do you suppose will happen on the days leading up to that Friday? It’s like marking the perfect storm on the calendar for a certain date, and triggering the panicked herd effect in advance. (It was bad luck for regulators that they kicked the can last summer to a week that already got off to a bad start.)

The circuit breaker that intervened as a result of all that selling is also a bad idea. Why? Most investors (especially Chinese investors) think of trading stocks as gambling, and the stock market is like a casino. If the casino owner tells you that it shuts its door any time the house loses, what will the gamblers do? They grab their money and run! There is a sense of honor among all those at the gambling table, and part of that honor is the mutual assurance that you can take your chips and cash them in whenever you want. The CSRC was quick to announce after Thursday that it will suspend its new counterproductive stock market circuit breaker, which was a good move even though it reinforced a sense that regulators are simply winging it day to day.

China, to be fair, had imported some of these restrictive measures from Western markets. We have circuit breakers too, and when companies first go public, U.S. markets also impose “lock-up” periods during which insiders can’t sell their stock. But Chinese markets have imported these concepts with excessive zeal, before they have established the credibility or transparency of Western markets. In hindsight, CSRC should not have banned major shareholders to sell any stakes, but could have set a time schedule for them to sell, say, no more than 5 percent of their stakes in each month. At least that would have smoothed things out.

There remains a larger overarching challenge for China’s leadership, and it isn’t clear that this is one they can conquer within the constraints of their political system. And that challenge is to accept a basic truth facing market-based economies plugged into the global economy: There will be down days, and pretending there won’t be, or can’t be, will only make people more anxious, and make things worse.

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